Not to Praise Them
Regimes that harbour illusions of permanent grandeur
are never more brutal and gauche than when
the earth begins to slip from under their feet
Despite the Bush-bravado that is again on display as American Senate/Congress elections approach, for every swaggering statement he makes nowadays, half a dozen other statements are made not just by individuals and institutions opposed to the Republican White House but by people who run it in one capacity or the other.
Statements that contradict the swagger and begin to register some hometruths. The top-secret assessment of the Marines’ Chief of Intelligence runs thus:
"The prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and (that) there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there”
Remember the goal of victory in Iraq? Savour this: “U.S. officials acknowledge their main goal in Iraq now is to prevent it from turning into a place run by fundamentalists who export terrorism to the region”
To cut a long story short, these are the facts: America has not only lost the war in Iraq but achieved the magnificent result of anointing Iran as its political guru and guardian! The neocon imperialists do not seem to succeed even in the alternate and nefarious purpose of fragmenting Iraq into three convenient regions.
As to oil, for five years now, the famed fields in Iraq fail to produce quantities that match even the worst years of the Saddam era; nor is it likely that anytime soon, the new, or still newer government in Iraq will make the neocon guzzlers lords of Iraqi oil fields. So much for Cheney and Halliburton.
Iraqis are now beginning to say openly that the Saddam-led Baathist dispensation was a better option.
Secondly, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon has had the further magnificent consequence of placing Hezbollah on a deservedly incontestable pedestal, whereby all Lebanese, including the Christians and the Druize swear by it.
That consequence in turn reestablishes Syria in a way that had seemed out of reckoning only months ago, in addition to exposing Israel as a floundering, second-rate state, without a friend in the world (excepting the United States and the Hindutva fascists in India).
Nearer home, as the municipal government of Hamid Karzai struggles to keep control of Kabul, the vaunted forces of the Nato and the U.S. military together are askance everyday at the resurgence of the Taliban who, don’t you know, were thought to be dead and buried as a result of the famous invasion of Afghanistan.
Alongwith that, the Al Qaeda machine seems able gleefully to produce one video message after another as the days go by, and Mushrraf- the- macho is constrained actually to sign an agreement with the Taliban in North Waziristan to the effect that no further military operations will be conducted in the region!
His domestic compulsions also force him now to disclose the unlovely fact that his close allies in the “war on terror’’, namely, the Bushies had in so many words threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the stone age unless she cooperated in the said war!
In consequence, this strategic bulwark against “terrorism” is being dubbed a disgraceful “coward” by the Pakistani media. How much longer Pakistan remains a unified nation-state begins to be a serious question.
Thus, what of the formidable “international alliance” in the “war on terror”?
With Blair now very publicly lame, and Italy recalling what forces it has in Iraq, now that the socialist, Romano Prodi, rules the roost there, the alliance comprises Bush and his worst hallucinations.
Think that even the so-loyal South Koreans pick up the courage to demand the withdrawal of American troops from their soil, and to express their longing for reunification with their ethnic brothers in the North.
Same for East Asia generally, barring the white exception of the Howard regime in Australia, and some undemocratic city-state regimes (Singapore, Phillipines etc.,)
As to the two “backyards,” Latin America and the erstwhile Baltic and Central Asian components of the then Soviet Union, wiser counsels prevail.
The Latin countries spawn anti-U.S regimes through the ballot box, and on this side of the Atlantic, even Ukraine is lost.
Indeed, so rapidly does the political balance of opinion internationally suffer alteration that Chavez actually draws open and zestful applause as he denominates Bush the “devil” in his speech to the U.N. General assembly.
And Ahmedinejad actually gets the better of the international press core in New York, forcefully and playfully establishing the reality that many of the American reporters may actually neither be as free or as smart as they perhaps erroneously believe themselves to be.